How to Play Moonfall

AI output can be incomplete, inconsistent, or wrong.

Moonfall is a free, AI-native collectible card battler that runs entirely in your browser. It looks like a card game you already know — a hand, a board, mana, a turn timer — but one rule changes everything: your cards have no attack or health numbers. Every card play is a prompt. When you play one, an AI Game Master reads it, weighs the moment, and writes what happens next. This guide walks you from your first login to your first finished story.

Getting in

There is nothing to install. Open Moonfall in your browser, sign in, and you land in the lobby. From there you can run the tutorial, take a practice match against the AI to learn the ropes, or challenge a friend with a room code. Play on a desktop or laptop — the game board wants room to breathe.

If it is your first time, start with the tutorial. It teaches the flow without throwing the whole card pool at you.

The board at a glance

A match is a duel between two summoners — that's you and your opponent. A few numbers matter:

• Health. You each start at 25. Drop your opponent to 0 and you win. Only players have health; cards do not.
• Mana. You spend mana to play cards. Your maximum mana grows by 1 each turn, up to a cap of 10, and refills at the start of every turn. So turn one is small and turn ten is enormous.
• Hand and board. You can hold up to 5 cards in hand and keep up to 5 on the battlefield at once.

Because the second player is a step behind on tempo, Moonfall evens things out: the player who goes first starts with a smaller hand and less mana, and the player who goes second gets a little more of both.

Card plays are prompts, not stat blocks

Pick up any card and you'll see two things: a mana cost and a short line of text. That's it. There's no "4/5," no keywords to memorize. A card that reads like a towering guardian will tend to shield your side; a card that reads like a plague will tend to spread. The text is deliberately evocative so you can imagine how to use it — and so the same card can surprise you in different situations.

There are two kinds of card:

• Characters are summoned to the board for their mana cost. Once they're out, you command them on later turns by dragging them onto a target.
• Spells are direct commands you cast from your hand — a single, specific effect, resolved right away.

Taking a turn

On your turn you play cards and command your board, then press End Turn. To act, you drag a card onto its target — an enemy summoner, one of their creatures, a card in a hand, or a deck. The moment you do, the AI Game Master reads the play, narrates it, and issues the resulting state changes: damage dealt, a creature frozen, a card stolen, a status changed.

This is the heart of Moonfall. You're not triggering a fixed ability — you're making a move that a storyteller resolves in context. Command a fire elemental to strike a small foe and it may simply burn it away; aim that same elemental at a crowded board and its flames might catch several enemies at once. Powerful, high-cost characters are treated as deliberately versatile: when you command one, the game offers you a few tactical intents to choose from — strike, shield, control — so you steer what that single big play means.

Because the Game Master reads the whole situation, creativity beats memorization. A clever line — using a spell's wording in a way the "meta" never considered — can absolutely work if the story supports it. And a misused card can cost you the play: cast a spell on an illegal target and you may lose the card and the mana for nothing, just as you would at a real table with a strict judge.

Every match becomes a manga

When the match ends, Moonfall does something no other card game does: it can ink the whole thing into a manga storybook. The plays you made, the turns of fortune, the finishing blow — all of it becomes a sequence of illustrated panels you can read top to bottom and share with a link. No two stories are ever the same, because matches rarely resolve the same way.

Where to go next

Once you've found your feet, Moonfall opens up:

• The Moon Foundry lets you fuse two cards into a new one — art, name, and all.
• Moon Dream dreams up personalized summoners and the spells they cast.
• Card packs grow your collection, and rare Stellar cards actually move and speak.
• The Moon Exchange lets you trade cards with players around the world.

But all of that can wait. Right now, the only thing you need to know is the loop: play a card, watch the story turn, and take the match to zero. Curious how the AI decides what your cards do? Read how the AI Game Master reads your plays. Ready instead? Play a match free and write your first little tale tonight.